If she were willing to be honest with herself, the boy's path had been set the first time their eyes locked.

Mira had been born an impulsive person and in all likelihood she would die one. It was the only thing she didn't like about herself, her fatal flaw she lived in fear of. As such, she had over the years developed an intense routine of retroactive justification - it was to this end that she had compiled every scrap of data the company data base had amassed on the boy and was digging through it for an inkling of what had made him stand out to her so.

The academic records she dismissed out of hand, and the social service's file followed it onto the pile. No one had ever learned anything about anybody by taking the government's word for it. This left various reports and disciplinary records, some authored by her own fantastically talented girlfriend. But, after all, no matter how much stock she put into her opinion, no one but Mira herself knew her true purpose.

≪☰≫

Finding a subject on which to base a whole operating system was no small task, but Mira had thought long and hard about the criteria she would apply and whose subjective evaluations she would take into account. In addition, since she was a big believer in the saying that if one wanted things done right one had to do them oneself, she had devised a way to screen all candidates who seemed promising herself.

Testing chamber 04 was built like a brutalist medical theater, a pit lit by the colourful blinking lights of machinery and too-bright LED light strips that cast Mira on the gallery above in shadows. Her chin rested on her propped up hand as she peered over the spartan metal balustrade, bored out of her mind. One after another, they were dragging in her candidates below, but so far she remained unimpressed by every one of them. She had always hated being in the presence of children, but she despised these ones especially - docile and despicable, handed from one rough grasp to another like they were thoughtless objects.

Perhaps then, it was mere novelty that made him stand out to her, but she never wished she'd reneged on her split second decision until much, much later.

Like all children before him, the boy was conveyed to the experimental set-up by a chain of uncaring gloved hands. He sat obediently, half reclined, as the electrodes and cables were affixed to him, although she thought for a second that she could see him grinding his teeth together as the straps were tightened. It meant nothing, a natural expression of ordinary pain.
He passed all scenarios thrown at him with flying colours, which only served to make him more boring to Mira. Proficiency was of no use to her in this, and in fact was rather an indicator of weakness.
She stood up straighter when as soon as the simulation was shut off, the boy began ripping the electrodes off his skin in sudden rage. Soon he was struggling in the arms of one of the lab security personnel, and as they yanked him around towards the entrance, his face tilted up and he snarled up at her. And so it had to be him.

≪☰≫

Whether or not Tump had been able to make out her face that day, she couldn't say. Certainly he gave no indication of recognizing her the next time their paths crossed. Although they were rightly wary of her, in a lab coat and slacks she fit right in among the staff. It was less than a month of involving herself in his life at the facility before Mira had put all her doubts to rest, but something moved her to continue with the charade.
If anyone had asked, she truthfully could not have said if she liked or loathed the boy. He was clever, but not so much that he became arrogant, and he was sensitive to his own emotions, but not so enough to stop himself drowning in despair. Watching him fascinated her as much as it vexed her, because the longer her eyes bored into the back of his inexpertly shorn head the more she could see herself in his place.

God himself could not have made her acknowledge it to even herself, but they were appallingly alike. The incensed anger in his eyes was the same certainty that things were wrong and in need of correcting that had driven her to striking out on her own, to destroying her snooty investors' lives, to finally claiming the CEO spot. He was real to her in a way that the other subjects haunting the facility's lower floors never were, and that made his presence intolerable. And yet she could not stop herself from seeking him out again and again, because there was a certain pleasure in molding him and breaking him into shape.
In another life, she might have taken him under her wing, given him a hand up. In this life, she stripped him for parts and did not for a second waver in her resolve to wield him as a tool.